Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the Editor-At-Large of TechCrunch. Mike is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub, in London initially.

A long time journalist, Mike has written for U.K. national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine.

Since 1996 he has launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia's European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ""One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade"" by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London's creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best ""Web 2.0 and business blog"" in the U.K., by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the U.K.

Also in 2009 he was named one of the Top 10 bloggers on Twitter in the U.K. In October 2009 he was named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. In April 2010 he was named as one of Britain's Top 100 ""digital power-brokers"" by Wired UK magazine. In November 2010 he was named as one of London's most influential people in New Media and ""king of dotcom commentators"" by The Evening Standard Newspaper. In February he was listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people on Twitter in the UK. He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4, and Bloomberg.

Latest from Mike Butcher

Jaman, the San Mateo-based P2P Web movie service, has struck a deal whereby TiVo subscribers will be able to access Jaman’s catalogue of American independent (think Sundance Film Festival) and international film titles directly from their TiVo DVR. Viewers will be able to rent and buy films starting at $1.99, with a number of shorts and full-length films available to download for free. Read More

Social travel site WAYN is allegedly in talks with AOL over a possible $200m sale to the consumer portal giant. A spokesperson for the UK startup denied that any sale talks are taking place. However, I have tonight spoken to three well-placed sources who have all independently quoted the $200m figure to me, and named AOL as the prospective buyer.
In a phone call tonight Anika Erskine… Read More

Swedish prosecutors have sent 4000 pages of legal documents to Swedish BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay. However, the group is unbowed. Even if convicted they plan to appeal all the way up to the European Court. Sweden, where the uber-file-sharing Kazaa originated, has a populus known for not caring a jot about file-sharing laws or copyright. Indeed seven members of the Swedish… Read More

Even as The Guardian was busy associating Facebook with a CIA plot yesterday, back in the world of its average UK users Facebook continued its inexorable rise. According to Hitwise and Experian today, Facebook accounted for one in every 50 UK Web visits in the last month of 2007, with its market share peaking on Christmas Day (I assume this was people updating their status to say… Read More

Euro News: Hello2morrow, a toolmaker for large scale Java projects, has received investment from mic AG, a listed German early-stage tech investor, which took a 25% stake. Hello2morrow has plenty of customers, many of which are reseller partners, and its tools are used in several open source distributions, reports Alarm Clock. Read More

Euro News: Czech startup Webnode appears to have been on mars for the past few years as it is launching a Web site building tool, ignoring moves by some little-known players called Google, WordPress, Six Apart and others. Granted, Webnode compares itself to Weebly and Google Page Creator but claims to do more along the lines of Ning’s drag and drop functions and widget integration. Free… Read More

Overall venture capital investment in Europe fell last year, but investment in “Cleantech” rose. The news suggests that VCs are moving away from investments in Web 2.0 technology startups towards higher growth investments related to the boom in environmental technology. However, given that there were so few Web 2.0 related deals from European VCs last year anyway, the sector is… Read More

Online radio station Pandora recently closed down in the UK and has been unavailable in Europe for a while. Of course, it’s possible to access it by playing around with a proxy service but it is often complicated and unreliable. But as TechCrunch France reports, now GlobalPandora has arrived to take the headache out of the process. It even identifies you with your existing Pandora account. Read More

Qype, a venture-backed pan-European reviews site, has launched in France, reports TechCrunch France. The move follows UK and German launches which technically makes it the only local review site with a pan-Europe footprint in local language. The site should do well in France which already has among the most vociferous blogging population in Europe, so people are quite used to submitting opinions. Read More

European regulation continues to be a thorn in Microsoft’s side. After years of investigations over alleged anti-competitive practices, the European Commission now has a large body of experienced prosecutors only too ready and willing to take up the cudgels on behalf of European entities, and others. And organisations like Opera Software, the Norway-based web browser company, are only… Read More

Newspepper, a new UK ‘citizen journalism’ site, has soft-launched its first incarnation with a number of flash videos recorded to showcase the site’s future direction. The site intends (but can’t just yet) to allow people to submit stories and multimedia, and aims to receive these by mobile as well as conventional Web methods – something of a competitive… Read More

A lecturer from the University of Brighton has banned her students from researching their essays on Google and Wikipedia, dubbing the phenomenon ‘The University of Google’. Speaking to the Brighton Argus newspaper Professor Tara Brabazon said thousands of students across the country, including those at the universities of Brighton and Sussex, were churning out banal and mediocre… Read More

UK entrepreneur Raj Anand, founded of kwiqq, has had his Facebook account disabled after he individually emailed all his friends and members of a Facebook group he runs. Anand recently launched an independent social network for Salsa dancers in Brighton and set up a Facebook group to support it. It was this group he was contacting.
As he blogs today:
I have spent god knows how many hours… Read More

Well, it’s been the first week in a new year here at TCUK Towers. The office still has bits of stray tinsel doggedly hanging onto the ceiling, while the interns are padding around sheepishly after that riotous Christmas party. But luckily I can ignore the drudgery of office life as my secretary has just popped in to tell me that it’s time to get stuck in to a pile of startups. To… Read More

The so-called ‘secondary ticket market’ has a bad rep in the UK. Scruffy ticket touts outside concert venues have been the traditional conduit for unsold tickets and they operate under the guise of everything from a shifty looking guy outside the venue all the way through to agencies – some even linked to organised crime – who bulk-buy the biggest concerts to sell on for… Read More

Apple comes in for some stick from the Financial Times this morning, which wonders why it will take the master of the iPod up to six months to bring the price of tracks on iTunes’ UK site down into line with other European countries. Granted, Apple’s move will address a European Commission antitrust probe, as it will now offer Brits the same price for iTunes downloads as on the… Read More

Google, IBM and VeriSign are all in talks with the OpenID foundation with a view to joining imminently, according to a highly-placed source. Digg, Technorati, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo and WikiPedia have previously announced their intention to support the standard which is seen as an easy way for users to use a single digital identity across the Internet. The official news about the new players… Read More

The European Union is very likely to rain on the whole data portability parade. Data privacy laws around the world do not uniformly fall into line when it comes to the likes of Google and Facebook. For instance, as ZDNet enterprise blogger Dennis Howlett cogently points out, article 8 of the UK Data Protection Act states:
8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory… Read More

FoundRead has a post called 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want to Avoid (but there are actually 12). It particularly applies to startups who already have revenues, who are now being courted by VCs. It’s an open question, but I’d just like to ask the general UK startup community out there: What do you think would be the UK/European equivalent? Here are some suggestions (inspired by… Read More

In a major move Facebook, Google and Plaxo are effectively ending their policy of keeping users locked-in to their social networks. As TechCrunch US reports, today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup, implying that users will soon be allowed to export their contacts from one social network to another, leaving each to compete on their own merits. It’s hard… Read More